10 years later: School safety policies improved after seven Strathcona-Tweedsmuir students died in 2003 avalanche

Richard Cuthbertson and Bryan Weismiller, Calgary Herald01.31.2013

A memorial in the library at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School honours the seven students who died in an avalanche on a school ski trip in Rogers Pass 10 years ago. Top row from left: Ben Albert, Marissa Staddon, Michael Shaw and Alex Pattillo. Bottom row from left: Scott Broshko, Daniel Arato and Jeffrey Trickett.Ted Rhodes
/ Calgary Herald

Mount Cheops in Rogers Pass near Revelstoke, B.C., is where seven students died in an avalanche in 2003. The avalanche started on the right side of the peak and followed the gully diagonally down the mountain into Connaught Creek Valley.KIP WILEY
/ FOR THE CALGARY HERALD

This is the entranceway to a memorial forest called The Forever Woods. It honours the seven students at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School who died in an avalanche on a 2003 school ski trip in Rogers Pass.Ted Rhodes
/ Calgary Herald

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The tears still flow like a river as Donna Staddon recalls “that terrible day” 10 years ago today, when the “unimaginable happened ...

CALGARY — The seaside village of Chester, Nova Scotia, is about as far away as you can get in Canada from Rogers Pass in the British Columbia mountains.

Jim Pattillo and his wife, Sue, live in a small Victorian farmhouse: “Nothing special, nothing fancy.” It looks out on the Atlantic Ocean, where the water surges when the wind blows hard.

Jim and Sue’s son, Alex, is buried in the cemetery of the local Anglican Church where three generations of the Pattillo family are laid to rest.

After Alex died when he was just 15, Chester eventually became what Jim and Sue needed, a place that would give them a “huge timeout” as they tried to cope. It was cathartic.

“You have to move on,” Jim said. “You have to put Alex in the right spot, where he is for us.

“You just can’t live with the what-ifs in the past and pull your heart out of your chest.”

Alex and six other Grade 10 students from Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School in Okotoks died 10 years ago today when a massive avalanche swept down Mount Cheops near Revelstoke.

The school group, made up of 14 private school students and three adults, had been skiing in the area. The other victims were Jeffrey Trickett, Scott Broshko, Marissa Staddon, Daniel Arato, Ben Albert and Michael Shaw.

It was a tragedy that touched people across Canada, stirred a national debate over outdoor education safety and is still talked about around the world.

Pattillo remembers Calgary being “shell-shocked.” Funerals for the teens were packed.

The Feb. 1, 2003, avalanche was another horrifying event in what was a horrifying winter in the western Canadian backcountry. That season, 29 people died in avalanches.

A series of reports were later drafted — and sometimes criticized. But unlike what too often happens, these did not gather dust in government stacks.

There have been real changes in how authorities, schools and recreationists treat the winter backcountry. Family of several Strathcona-Tweedsmuir victims have since acknowledged they are pleased with the major progress made in the past decade.

Ross Cloutier, an expert on outdoor education, was hired to author a study on Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School’s outdoor education program. He produced a 58-page report that spurred schools nationwide to examine their policies.

“This was the biggest event ever that forced schools to sit up and take a look at what they were doing,” said Cloutier, a professor in the adventure studies department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.

However, he fears the lessons learned over the past decade could be forgotten as new outdoor education instructors take the reins.

“Teachers have come into the system in the past 10 years that don’t know about this event,” he said. “They don’t know the implications of it.”

A decade ago, 17 skiers from Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, a prestigious private school, were on a field trip in Glacier National Park in Connaught Creek Valley, just west of Rogers Pass. The backcountry outing was part of the school’s mountain leadership program and had become a tradition for Grade 10 students.

Students often described it as the highlight of the year.

Feb. 1, a Saturday, was the second day of the four-day expedition. The avalanche risk was weighed as “considerable” or in the middle of the five-level scale. It meant natural avalanches were possible and human-triggered ones were likely.

Witnesses later recalled hearing a loud crack reverberating across the valley before a mammoth snowpack came thundering down the mountainside.

A violent load — about a kilometre long and capable of steamrollering 10 hectares of forest — spilled onto the ski party, who were on the opposite side of the valley.

Park wardens, ski guides and Canadian soldiers started digging almost immediately.

Seven students were killed and 10 other skiers were pulled from the rough, rocky terrain.

The first survivor, an outdoor education teacher, was found within five minutes. The rest were accounted for within the next two hours.

The teenagers who survived are now adults. Some remain in the Calgary area, others have left. Those contacted by the Herald declined to share their stories. One of the survivors, Mark Nimitz, died in 2008 in an accident on the family ranch in British Columbia, according to an obituary.

Families of the dead have found ways of coping. For Samantha, Ben Albert’s older sister, the pain never really left — her family is just better at managing it.

She plans on going to work this morning and doesn’t want to “give this day more power than it has already over us.” She will visit Ben’s grave, and spend time with her family.

“He was taken so suddenly and in such a tragic way that it definitely hurts every day that he’s not here,” she said.

In the years after the tragedy, Donna Broshko, whose son Scott died in the slide, launched herself into avalanche safety advocacy.

Broshko joined the Canadian Avalanche Foundation. She was part of the effort that turned avalanche safety and awareness on its head, both in Canada and around the world.

Life without Scott was hard. Snow falling outside her home was a trigger. It reminded Donna of her son’s death and her mind would turn to what those children went through.

To get through it all, her little saying became “busy is the recipe.”

Annual golf and hockey tournaments are held in her son’s name. Broshko bakes ginger snaps, Scott’s favourite, for everyone there.

The 15-year-old lived his life to its best, his mother said, and the family now tries to follow him.

They have a little logo with a torch on it and tell people, “let’s carry Scott’s torch.”

“We’ve really taken up his motto. We just try to be the best that we can be,” she said.

Broshko has stepped away from the avalanche organization, and now co-chairs the 63rd Oilmen’s, a gathering of oil industry leaders.

Those business people are one of the three legs she credits with improved backcountry safety, donating money for better avalanche awareness and research.

She also credits Parks Canada with forging ahead with significant projects and new rules, while the media kept the issue alive.

The Connaught Creek avalanche was one of a slew in the mountains over the winter of 2002-2003. Less than two weeks earlier, 13 elite backcountry skiers were swept away in a slide in the Selkirk Mountains area, also near Revelstoke. Seven of them died.

Such high-profile deaths in the mountains were swiftly becoming the norm and the pressure increased on authorities to do something.

In the 1990s, the backcountry became popular like never before. It wasn’t just the skiers, either. Snowmobilers arrived in increasing numbers.

In the aftermath of the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir deaths, Parks Canada issued a report. The B.C. Coroner’s report was made public in 2004, just days before the first anniversary of the avalanche.

They were not universally well received.

The family of Daniel Arato levelled sharp criticisms at the school following Daniel’s death. They also balked at authorities’ early reports on the tragedy, claiming they were riddled with mistakes, short on consultation and lacking recommendations.

More than anything else, the grieving family craved answers about the decision-making processes leading up to the deadly slide. They wanted to know where things went wrong, where the “safety net” for the children broke.

They pushed hard, and now see the results. Daniel’s mother, Judith Arato, said they are pleased with many of the changes aimed at preventing deaths in the mountains.

She said she is particularly impressed with what the school has done.

Bruce Hendricks won’t forget what happened. In 2003, he was living in Australia, and learned of the avalanche by email.

Today, he is director of outdoor education at Strathcona-Tweedsmuir where he oversees all outdoor trips.

“The impacts have been worldwide, there’s no doubt about it,” he said of the 2003 avalanche. “Any time something of that magnitude happens, you hope that there’s goodness that comes out of the pain and that there is something good that develops as a result of the tragedy.”

Despite the avalanche tragedy, Strathcona-Tweedsmuir did not abandon its outdoors program. Such programs date a back a century to the founding of the three schools that make up Strathcona-Tweedsmuir today.

But in the aftermath of the avalanche the school accepted its area of responsibility for what went wrong, calling it a “terrible price,” and instituted changes.

One of the biggest is making sure the “informed consent” of parents really is “informed.” A decade ago, a letter with a one-paragraph description of the trip and a consent form sufficed.

Not anymore. One of the things Cloutier learned in his investigation of the avalanche deaths was that some parents had little idea of what backcountry skiing entailed. Some thought their children were heading to a ski resort in Fernie.

There is much more due diligence today. Parents now attend briefings on the ins and outs of the trips, the risks, the potential dangers and what the school does to mitigate those.

They view maps and photos, and are told about the types of activities their children will be undertake. They are shown snapshots of hiking during a glorious day, but also tents under half a metre of snow.

The point is to make sure parents fully understand the implications.

“The briefings show not only the activities, but they show the environments under a variety of conditions. Not just the kind of tourism brochure conditions,” said Hendricks, the school outdoor program director. “They list hazards and the types of things we’ve put in place to try to be proactive.”

The avalanche was also a very public wake-up call for authorities.

Today, at the trailhead for the Connaught Creek, there is a large map braced with wooden beams bolted together.

Stretching down the middle of the map are large splashes of red — colour indicators of “complex” terrain. In other words, it’s an area with the highest level of potential avalanche danger.

After 2003, Parks Canada erected these types of signs at key passes through the mountain parks, part of a broader collection of policies and practices to prevent people from dying in avalanches.

They drew up a classification system called the Avalanche Terrain Exposure Scale, which shifted focus away from the snow itself, and onto the terrain.

It was something mountain guides long knew, but information that had never been issued to the public. The scale was subsequently adopted by other countries, including the United States, Norway and Japan.

Also key was making it easy for the public to understand. Icons were adopted to describe the terrain, while another layer of information adding technical details. Areas are noted as simple, challenging, or complex, depending on the avalanche exposure.

“Custodial groups” — school trips and such — are now banned from all complex areas. Had those rules been in place in 2003, the Strathcona-Tweedsmuir group never would have ventured down Connaught Creek.

Even to enter the less risky “challenging” terrain, school groups must now be led by guides certified through the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides.

A further move was to create the Canadian Avalanche Centre, which focuses on safety.

“In 2003, we had this terrible winter, all those accidents including the one with the kids,” said Grant Statham, a mountain risk specialist with Parks Canada.

“And that just tipped it. When those reports came out everybody went ‘All right, obviously the backcountry is a different place than it was in 1990.’ ”

The effort hasn’t eliminated avalanche deaths and there are still about a dozen a year Canada. In 2008, there were 22.

But experts say the number of people now hitting the backcountry has climbed, and the avalanche safety and awareness work has saved lives.

Jim Pattillo has never blamed the mountains for causing his son’s death. It’s a little like blaming the sea when someone drowns, he figures.

Children used to grow up on farms, but today they know little about the environment. That’s why Pattillo said it’s important that schools still offer outdoor programs and trips into the backcountry.

“Without that, it will be a huge loss, particularly with the over-urbanization going on today,” he said.

At Strathcona-Tweedsmuir, there remain reminders of the avalanche. There is a memorial to the students who lost their lives. Photos of the victims hang in the library. There are scholarship funds.

The annual “honour day” assembly will be held at the school today. Donna Broshko and her husband Dave, Scott’s father, will be there. It will be first time they have attended.

Judith Arato will be there, too. She’s not missed a single one since the beginning.

“I sit there and listen to what the principal says,” she said. “I hope he talks about how the school has become a safer place in all these years.”

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10 years later: School safety policies improved after seven Strathcona-Tweedsmuir students died in 2003 avalanche